Western Digital My Book Duo offers space, speed, safety in a box

By JC Torres/Aug. 23, 2017 7:38 am EST

As much as we consume a ton of digital content, we also make a ton of them. From home videos recorded from our smartphones, cinematic footage from drones, environmental data coming from sensors and robot vacuum cleaners, the works. We'll need a place to keep all of those, and our measly desktops, much less our external hard drives are definitely not up to the task. Answering the call, Western Digital, one of the leading makers of data storage solutions, has just announced the new My Book Duo that brings up to 20 TB of storage and RAID backups while remaining as simple to use as a USB hard drive.

You might not need 20 TB and the My Book Duo definitely has options for as low as 4 TB. But since the drives don't seem to be replaceable in any way, you're locking yourself out quite early if you opt for the lowest capacity. The My Book Duo box comes with Western Digital's own Red drives that boast of 360 MB/s speeds, at least in sequential reads. That reading speed is complemented by the use of USB Type C (USB 3.1 Gen 1, 2.0, and 3.0 supported) for transferring data to and fro the storage.

Using a high capacity storage wouldn't be much of an assurance if the data gets easily lost or corrupted. Like many high-capacity storage solutions, the WD My Book Duo offers RAID for backup. Out of the box it comes with RAID-0 for faster data transfer speeds. But for peace of mind, you can also reconfigure the storage to use RAID-1 instead.

In addition to being a storage solution, the My Book Duo can also act as a makeshift hub via its two USB Type-A prots. You can connect keyboard, mice, other USB drives, or even drones to leave your computer's USB ports open for other things. Presuming it even has other USB ports at all.

The Western Digital My Book Duo storage system is now available for purchase in the following capacities and prices: $799.99 (20TB), $599.99 (16TB), $419.99 (12TB), $329.99 (8TB), $289.99 (6TB), and $259.99 (4TB). All purchases come with a three-year limited warranty.